Wiki-versation

I chose to edit The Buzz, a page on Daviswiki concerning the event held by Campus Recreation, Campus Unions and Student Affairs for UC Davis Students.

I work for the Campus Recreation marketing department, and one of our goals was to get involved with the wiki community because many students use Daviswiki for information about campus programs.

I edited the page under the username CampusRec, which was the username our department decided to edit with.

Here's a link to the page edit info.

http://daviswiki.org/The_Buzz?action=info

The first edit I did was just to remove some of the implication on the event being tailored to freshmen and a somewhat ironic comment about the event being called "The Buzz" when it was alcohol free.

The edit received almost immediate negative feedback, both for removal of content and that I was editing under a user name. But the things I removed were either inaccurate (targeting freshmen) and opinion based (the alcohol content) so they should have been removed or at least changed. So I changed it back and left a comment on the other editors page.

During this time I also received a comment on my user page saying that I probably meant to edit the content page Campus Recreation, but that I had accidentally created a user page. I responded that I hadn't and this was the profile for Campus Recreation.

Both of these discussions caused considerable argument. My boss got involved with The Buzz page edits and the whole situation quickly escalated into a revert-war with a few personal attacks involved. There was very little to no productive discussion. Finally a few other editors got involved and a solution was reached with the final result removing the alcohol comment and referencing an old event that targeted freshmen that The Buzz replaced. I added one more edit under the CampusRec user name which was received with sarcasm: "THAT LAST EDIT WAS **OFFICIAL**!! (With a tin badge and all!)".

I finally created a personal user name MattSmidebush, which I then used to edit the page. This edit stuck and one of the major Daviswiki members left a comment on my page thanking me for creating an account. In the comment he mentioned the 'problem' of 'role accounts' (aka what I created for Campus Recreation), so I'm fairly sure no one was fooled with my account.

However, the content I added is still there (with minor changes) so I guess I did do something right.

Final conclusions:

The Talk pages are really helpful with keeping unproductive discussion out of edits, and reducing edit wars.

"Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Some experts contend that expert credentials are given less weight than contributions by amateurs. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific or medical or engineering articles. One advantage to having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands so that they can make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists." -Wikipedia About page

This is very true. The edit made by my personal account was given more weight than the "official" edit.

While I think that this was a really interesting wiki-versation, it shows an interesting issue that people haven't really begun discussing yet: corporate interest in the wiki platform. Many people rely on wikis for local and encyclopedic information, and this is an excellent opportunity for companies to get a leg up on each other.